Glad To Be Unhappy

It’s the kind of late-October Sunday that they sing songs about, or did once—sunny and cool, fareless cabs plying Seventh Avenue, wordless brunchers slouching at their tables in the many varieties of morning-after. A short line of gossipers and smokers stand outside Film Forum, on Houston, waiting for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Tokyo Story.” Around the corner, at 160 Varick, up on the eighth floor of the public-radio building, nearly vacant today, Jonathan Schwartz, a man in the melancholy blue of his years—handsome once, a little fragile now—sits alone at a microphone in a soundproof studio. He is wearing roomy jeans, a denim shirt, and a Red Sox cap.

A record ends, and the dead seconds fall away, russet leaves off an oak. The air on WNYC-FM is as silent as Miss Havisham’s parlor. Schwartz, with no evident concern, lets the nothing happen. He fumbles with a jewel case. He slides the disk into a player. He clears his throat with an alarming liquid rip—ah-HEM! He locates a button on his console and punches it. And then, finally, he speaks.

“There was, in this world,” he says, just a breathy notch above an Alec Baldwin whisper, “until it disappeared, an album. Called ‘Bittersweet.’ By Carmen McRae.”

The pauses suggest an ego—or, better, an assurance that you, the listener, will wait. It is the assurance of a horn player—Miles Davis on “All Blues”—who comes in at his own sweet bidding, knowing that the waiting is as much a part of the music, the desired atmosphere, as the phrase that comes next. And that is what Schwartz is selling—not one record after another so much as the creation of an atmosphere in which the Great American Songbook is, in his view, properly tendered and absorbed. He casts the spell of steady rain at night, languorous autumn afternoons. Now it is 1964. The Stones have issued their début record. But that is elsewhere. Norman Simmons is at the piano. Carmen McRae sings “I’m Going to Laugh You Right Out of My Life.”

Schwartz takes off his headphones and wheels around in his chair.

“You like Carmen?” he says.

In the late sixties and the seventies, Schwartz did a progressive-rock show on WNEW-FM in the prime evening spot. But he had to study the music; it wasn’t what he loved first. Now, at seventy-five, he doesn’t mind sounding out of it; hip-hop and pop sink his boat. “You know, we’ve reached rock bottom these days,” he says. “The music of the street—much of it is not music. It’s just threats, with an occasional rhyme. And the popular music sung by—what?—by nude women is, alas, hopeless.”

Schwartz is not merely obsessed with the American Songbook; it’s his biography, his soundtrack. His father was Arthur Schwartz, a composer just a rung below the likes of Rodgers and Hart and the Gershwins. For a decade, Jonathan sang those songs at Michael’s Pub and other rooms around the city. At the most recent of Schwartz’s weddings, his fourth, to the actress Zohra Lampert, Tony Bennett sang a Schwartz-Howard Dietz standard, “I See Your Face Before Me.” His Saturday-evening and Sunday-afternoon shows run four hours. It is entirely possible to wish that there were fewer sugar cubes in his brew, that he played more Billie Holiday and fewer cheery cabaret singers, but it is a program, in the age of Clear Channel and Pandora and Spotify, with the rarest thing—its own voice.

For decades, Schwartz has been radio’s foremost explicator of Frank Sinatra. Which Sinatra appreciated. Except once. When, in 1980, Schwartz declared on WNEW that parts of “Trilogy” were “narcissistic,” Old Blue Eyes went dark. He made calls to powerful people. Suddenly, Schwartz was put on “sabbatical” for three months. Seven years later, Sinatra obliquely apologized from the stage of Carnegie Hall, telling the assembled, “There’s a man here tonight who knows more about me than I do myself. Don’t mess with Jonno, I’m tellin’ ya.”

At times in his career, Schwartz was on the air seven days a week. “I believe in that . . . constancy,” he says. “There are so many people alone, people in hospitals, in jail, who count on a certain reassurance.” Come November 1st, Schwartz will be a constant presence online. WNYC will back, assemble, and feature a streaming site called thejonathanchannel.org. All Schwartz, all the time. Ella, Basie, Tony Bennett, the Pizzarellis. And Frank. The higher make-out music. Click. It’ll be there.

“These are important things that can last forever if given a chance,” Schwartz says, fumbling again through a stack of disks. “The music moves into the future with all of us and our children because it is good. It’s American classical music.” Then he lifts a finger, signalling “quiet.” He clears his throat. Ah-HEM. He punches a button. He waits. ♦

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.